View article

Studies assessing attentional bias for food often present food stimuli as irrelevant distractors. Load theory of attention suggests that the level of perceptual and cognitive load in a task influence selective attention differently (Lavie, 2005). High perceptual load exhausts capacity and so reduces distraction by irrelevant stimuli whereas high cognitive load has the opposite effect. However, paradigms to test food-related attentional biases to date have not controlled for task load. Therefore, the first aim of this study was to test whether attention directed to food stimuli is modulated by perceptual load. Secondly, given the multitude of individual differences that have been shown to interact with attentional biases for food, we also tested whether these persist under high load. Seventy two female participants were tested using a visual search task, where participants searched for target letters (X or N) that appeared randomly in …